I was tickled to death to be invited to speak at the Duke chapter of Smart Woman Securities Wednesday November 2nd, and I can't wait to report back on that event.

The topic they asked me to speak about is "Finding and researching investment ideas." To make it easy on me, they helpfully provided a complete Powerpoint on this topic. The thrust of the slide deck is fundamental analysis of individual stocks.

Since you all know I've been into passive indexing for almost 20 years, I swallowed hard when I read what they recommended I present.

After a conversation with SWS last evening, they told me I'm OK to go off-script (go rogue?) and reference my own experiences in the discussion with the group. (Phew!). Here's my outline:

Where do you get the wealth to invest? Excluding inheritance, people get wealth in four ways:

Grow a company fast and sell

Grow a company and hold the company itself as wealth

Earn a high income and invest well over time

Earn a lower income, create a high savings rate, and invest well over time.

Savings Rate, Income Level (including the value of companies you appreciate), investment time horizon, investment cost-consciousness, and consistency of approach are usually way more important than security selection.

What savings rate should you aspire to? How does that savings rate translate to years-to-Financial Independence (FI)?

Finally, after covering all these topics, we'll get to how you construct your portfolio and the role fundamental analysis might play in selecting single stocks or other investments such as real estate (spoiler alert: Either you're working for a hedge fund, pension or endowment and it's your all-consuming job, or else the "single stock" portion of your portfolio should be your play money, kept to less than 10% of the total portfolio value).

I'll report back soon! And Lucy and I are going to make a father-daughter date out of the event.